Moments before a make-or-break debate with Donald Trump, Kamala Harris got an unexpected phone call: It was a peeved President Joe Biden, demanding to know why she had been bad-mouthing him to donors.
The call left Harris rattled at a critical moment in her abbreviated campaign and highlighted her at-times strained relationship with her boss, the former vice president writes in a new memoir released Thursday.
“My head had to be right. I had to be completely in the game,” she recalled. “I just couldn’t understand why he would call me, right now, and make it all about himself.”
Harris recounts the anecdote in “107 Days,” her account of her failed sprint of a campaign for the White House, to illustrate what she portrays as an at-times strained relationship with Biden before and after his decision to abruptly abandon his reelection effort.
Harris wrote she felt “warmth and loyalty” towards Biden, but that their relationship was tested leading up to the election, including with the phone call ahead of the September debate when he accused her of criticizing him to “powerbrokers” in Philadelphia. “Why’s he asking that?” Harris wrote.
Biden’s call came moments before a pivotal juncture for her campaign. Harris detailed the pressure she felt to perform well in the debate against Trump, likening the moment to a “prizefight.”
Harris detailed her struggle to distance herself from Biden, acknowledging she took “too much time” before realizing his negative impact on her candidacy. She was criticized during the campaign for saying in an interview with ABC’s “The View” she couldn’t think of anything she would have done differently from Biden during his four years in office.
She pushed back on claims from Republicans that those close to Biden were covering up an incapacity to perform the presidency. She said the president was overworked in the lead-up to his disastrous debate performance and blamed his top aides for pushing him to run for reelection despite his age.
“They should have counseled him accordingly,” Harris wrote. “Instead, it seemed that the worse things got, the more they pushed him. And the more they pushed, the faster and more visibly his energy seemed to drain.”
